KPH tech blog

In my previous post, I briefly looked at the benchmark set by the internal specs of my current device while mentioning that I wouldn’t be settling for anything below that benchmark. Although I mentioned battery capacity, something I didn’t talk about was the more important topic of battery life.

When I say battery ‘life,’ I mean both how long the battery will last on a single charge, and also how long the battery will last in correlation with the phone’s age – i.e. the battery’s total lifespan. Therefore, I thought it would be useful to go into more depth on phone batteries.

First, let’s consider the type of battery. It’s likely that all the phones I’ll look at will come with lithium-ion batteries, as this seems to be the prominent type of battery being used.

Now let’s consider how long a battery will last on a single charge. When I first got my HTC Desire Eye a little under 2 years ago (January 2015), I used to get a few hours of full usage from about 2 hours of charging. While that time has gradually depleted as the phone and battery have gotten older, it’s still about the same even now – and I’m a pretty heavy power-user, at times!

What’s also changed in that time was how I charged my phone. When I first got my phone, I didn’t know there was such a thing as ‘fast-charging,‘ and it wasn’t a deciding factor when buying the HTC desire Eye. I had gone online to buy a spare charger, and after reading an article about Quick Charging 2.0, I was directed to Qualcomm’s website where I found a list of Snapdragon processors that supported the technology. That’s when I found out my Desire Eye could support fast-charging, and it was only at this point that I looked at the box in which it came in – and sure enough, in black and white, there it said ‘Quick Charge 2.0.’

After investing in a HTC-spec Quick Charge 2.0 UK adapter, I saw full charge times halved – now, it only took about an hour and 10 minutes to go from around 2% to a full charge.

Still, I used to get a few hours of use before needing a charge, even a quick-charge, and if we were just to look at the battery capacity, without considering UI or app usage, then I’d say anything above 2,400mAh would be nice – even above 3,000mAh if possible.

But it’s not all about battery capacity, which is probably why the newer iPhones still have some of the lowest battery capacity specs on the market – a measly 1,960mAh for the iPhone 7, compared to the 3,000mAh lithium ion battery in Samsung’s Galaxy S7.

It’s also not about how much power you have at your disposal – it’s more about how power-efficient your phone is when completing tasks, and if it’s particularly power-hungry compared to other devices.

But it’s power-hunger isn’t just limited to the phone itself. It’s also relevant to the OS, and every single app you have installed on your device. Maybe the reason Apple are still including a smaller battery in their phones is because over the years, iOS has become less power-hungry, and more power-efficient. It doesn’t need to burn the midnight oils in the same way it needed to five or six years ago.

The same goes for Android. Android 7 is less hungry and more efficient than Android 2. The problem herein lies with the individual manufacturers, like Huawei or Samsung or HTC, and how efficient they can get their devices to be – which includes the power consumption and efficiency of not just the flavour of Android (TouchWiz, Sense, Emotion UI) but also the processor type and speed, graphics, audio DAC, haptic feedback, et cetera.

Anything that can affect the battery life in-between charges, often does. It may be fantastic to have a 5.5 inch Super AMOLED display on an S7 Edge sporting a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels at 534 pixels per inch, versus the iPhone 7 Plus’ inferior 5.5 inch LED IPS LCD screen, with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 rated at 401 pixels per inch – but, the battery life of the S7 Edge in practice may be slightly worse than the iPhone 7 Plus.

To know how different they are, I’d have to do an actual comparison, but that isn’t the point of this blog series, nor do I have the available budget to do so.

All I am going to say is that, now that I have such features as fast charging, I will only be considering devices that support some form of fast charging, and only those with higher battery capacities.

I know this cuts back again on the amount of devices available, but I’m just not sure I could go back to waiting two or more hours for my device to charge unless there’s a very good reason for it (iPhones, I’m looking at you). Especially when you need a quick charge to ensure your phone will last on a night out!